One last post on Newtown and then onto Christmas stuff. My dining table is piled high with unsent Christmas cards and empty boxes, which are in badly in need of baked goods. Life is really too sweet right now to get mired in madness. But I have two quick anecdotes that need to be shared.
Yesterday, I met with my usual coffee clutch of moms at the swimming pool at the YMCA. We started talking about Newtown before we dumped the bags and took off our coats.
One woman said that she had to commit her son to a hospital when he had a terrible reaction to an anti-depressant medication. Anti-depressants are tricky. It takes a couple of weeks for it to build up in your system, but it also takes a couple of weeks to get it out of you. I guess his reaction was so bad that she felt that he needed to be hospitalized for assure the safety of the boy and his family. She's an extremely responsible woman, so I'm sure that she didn't make this decision lightly.
She said that it was extremely difficult to do commit her son to a mental hospital. The schools and the insurance companies refused to pay for it. The insurance company told her that she had to call the police on her son multiple times before they would cover the stay in the hospital.
When he was finally in the hospital (she ended up paying for it out of pocket), she didn't think he was safe there. He was mixed in with kids with very severe emotional problems and they attacked him. She spent the day at the hospital with him in order to protect him.
I'm not sure if this story is typical or not, but if it is, then maybe we do need to examine mental health support in this country.
After swimming, I drove to a sport complex to pick up Jonah and his teammates from speed training. On the way back, I rolled down the windows to get some relief from 13-year old boy stink. The boys chattered away about school and some random shit that I couldn't follow. Then one of the boys started a discussion about which teachers would take a bullet for them. It was typical black humor of young teenage boys, but it was disturbing. It's weird how kids cope with these sorts of traumas.
And that's it for the horror story of Newtown on this blog. You all can chat, but I'm moving on. Baking be happening here.
Apt. 11d 
“She said that it was extremely difficult to do commit her son to a mental hospital. The schools and the insurance companies refused to pay for it. The insurance company told her that she had to call the police on her son multiple times before they would cover the stay in the hospital.”
That’s unfortunate.
I have a relative who works in psychology (primarily in brain injury cases) and she says that the tricky thing about mental health is that you can always be just a little bit better. I’d add that it can also be fuzzy as to where pain-in-the-neck-insensitive-jerk stops and where real mental health issues begin.
Our young, very troubled relative lives in Canada, and we never quite know when she’s in and when she’s out. She’s taken to checking herself into the psych wing whenever she is having paranoid ideation and then saying that whatever she said to get in was a lie whenever she wants to get out again. The suburban psych wing people are thoroughly sick of her, although it sounds like the city hospital may have more skill in dealing with her. I can imagine what a US insurance company would make of her post facto claims that she had been making up the attacks of paranoia. Even in Canada, we are naturally concerned that she will eventually wear out her welcome at the psych wing if she keeps claiming that she was making up her attacks of paranoia.
Even with the family connections in the mental health world, it has been hard to find a good outpatient psychiatrist who can treat multiple diagnoses (ADHD, short term memory loss caused by repeated brain injuries, PTSD, and some mental condition that is causes paranoia, substance abuse issues). I don’t know if the situation is better in the US, but I believe I’ve heard that in general, it’s hard to find a psychiatrist who is competent to treat multiple diagnoses. Even with only a single diagnosis, there seems to be endless adjusting of medication. Also, for a long time, our relative was really good at pulling herself together and putting on a good show for psychiatrists who only saw her for an hour at a time. Of course, her repeated self-admits since then probably make it impossible for her to hoodwink mental health professionals anymore, which is a good thing.
Our troubled relative can’t live alone, she can’t live with her parents, and she doesn’t want to live in a group home. Personally, when I hear “group home,” my first association is “abuse,” but she doesn’t have a lot of good options.
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Baking is more interesting anyway. Be sure to post a picture of this year’s cookies.
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Will do!!! Happy, homey pictures coming up soon.
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26 hours before I can start holiday drinking.
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Laura- my 7th grade daughter also gave me the rundown on her teachers and which ones would possible protect his/her kids from a gunman.(unprompted by me of course, she just launched into the topic) Overall, she thought most would not. Luckily, she’s not a girl prone to anxiety and this doesn’t seem to really be impacting her mentally.I feel for the kids and parents who deal with baseline anxiety and now might be dealing with lots of additional issues.
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My son was just in a mental institution. I am, at some point, going to write about this on my own blog, but I need to get through the holidays. He’s severely depressed/anxious. Because he called the suicide hotline and ended up in the ER (we took him there), insurance covered everything. He spent two weeks in a residential program specifically for teenagers. His issues were similar to many, though there were a few kids there who had actually attempted suicide or who were practicing self harm or who had abusive parents or other relatives. Getting treatment is difficult and expensive. We’re on therapist number 3, who doesn’t take insurance. Intake was close to $1000. We’re in for 10-12 sessions at a couple hundred a pop, but we want our son to be well, so we don’t care about the expense.
Besides being expensive, I think mental health issues are challenging, especially in teens. They don’t exactly tell you what’s going on in their heads. They’re good at hiding their issues because they want to be “normal”, and sometimes, they don’t even know what’s going on. We’ve discovered many things that our son was not telling the doctors about what he was doing/thinking, which might have helped his diagnosis.
He’s on medication and things are moving in a mostly positive direction. But the whole thing is time consuming and very tricky, and though the school has been as supportive as possible, there is definitely not enough support for kids with these kinds of issues. School work has been the most difficult area for us to address. We have no clue what goes on at school. The teachers all communicate as best they can, but mostly with our son, and don’t get to us until things reach a crisis stage. It’s been a real struggle. It just needs less stigma attached to it. And incidents like the Newtown one at once shine a light on the issue, but also stigmatize it again by lumping all mental illness into the kind that creates a killer.
Sigh. I’m ready for the baking too, both in my own home, and in this virtual space.
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Laura and Laura/GM? Hugs and sympathy. Even here in Canada, it’s tough to access mental health services. Many aren’t covered by the provincial health system (counselling in particular) and this ends up being one more venue where you have to pour out the whole long personal history. When you’re barely keeping up, the whole ordeal is completely wearing.
I’ll be baking at least three holiday cookies, too. Maybe starting tonight! Because even if I can’t get rid of Youngest’s problems, I can be here for her and we can bake together and that’s pretty good, isn’t it?
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“Even here in Canada, it’s tough to access mental health services. Many aren’t covered by the provincial health system (counselling in particular) and this ends up being one more venue where you have to pour out the whole long personal history.”
Am I right in thinking that psychiatric (an MD and in-patient care) is covered under Canadian healthcare, but a psychologist (a PhD) isn’t? (Although I have the feeling that Canadian worker’s comp may cover psychologists.)
We just hosted a family with four kids to roll, bake and decorate gingerbread cookies.
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Laura/GeekyMom, I’m really sorry that your son has had a rough patch. Please do write about it.
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Amy, what I’ve found here is that psychologists are covered, but psychiatrists that will take insurance are few and far between. Those that specialize in teen issues are rarer still.
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It’s depends upon the province. Most/all cover psychiatrists/psychologists and some cover social workers (Ontario).
Children’s mental health is free til 18 but you sometimes have to wait to be treated unless you are a risk to yourself or others (then you go to the front of the line).
Even so, it’s such a difficult thing to navigate. The average person has little idea how to evaluate who is going to have the expertise to treat their child’s particular issue. And fewer and fewer practitioners have experience in working with families.
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Laura/Geekymom, thinking of you and your family this holiday season and wishing you all the possible glory.
Laura/11d, there’s an article in the NYT today that I’m sure you’ll see about the challenges of getting mental health care–apparently, the number of beds available for patients with mental illness in the US is at the lowest point since the 1850s.
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